"I try to make things fascinatinger." – Ira Glass (host of NPR's "This American Life" show).
My thought: the key to life is to stay interested. That's where living in a foreign country and teaching children come in – they keep me pretty interested, even if things aren't always easy or perfect or convenient.
I have begun to really enjoy my first graders, even though I have yet to have a "good" class with them – they're so unruly, so chaotic, so difficult to calm down and control even for a few minutes. Their picture will be included in a definition of the expression: "…like herding cats."
So why am I enjoying them? Hmm… I think it comes down to the same reason I enjoy trying to learn Korean – the sheer perverse difficulty of the undertaking, in and of itself, is what I enjoy.
I see the little ones, my first graders, filtering into the classroom, and I watch myself carefully. What am I doing that "works"? What am I doing that "doesn't work"? How does the dynamic among the children inevitably result in milling, leaping, sitting-on-the-kid-next-door, shrieking, impossible-to-control chaos?